December Meme: fictional_fans

[melannen]

So, fictional_fans is a community I have been mentioning a lot lately. Possibly to the point of being annoying and I should stop, but my co-mod jjhunter suggested this, so here is the (possibly slightly misremembered) story of

fictional_fans was created by staranise because she wanted a Perfectly Generic Fandom Community to use as an example in a Dreamwdith tutorial she was working on. (She has in fact just posted Basic Dreamwidth For Tumblr Users, which is a very good short overview, and doesn't reference the comm at all, which was probably a very wise decision.)

She asked people to make model fannish posts of any variety there, and to start comment threads on, so she'd have lots of examples of different kinds to use in her tutorial.

I had actually been wishing for a Perfectly Generic Fannish Community on Dreamwidth for awhile, for reasons we will explore later in this post, and there were already quite a few people who had added fictional_fans, so it seemed like a good start, and I asked staranise if we could actually make real fannish posts there, and maybe even turn it into a real community, and she responded by making me a mod, and I abused my new power to add the next poor mook who showed an interest as a co-mod, and I put exactly two perfectly generic content guidelines in the profile, and here we are now.

Why I want a Perfectly Generic Fannish Community to exist on Dreamwidth has a lot to do with my general feelings about Dreamwidth comms, which are based on my observation of multiple cycles of what I'm seeing again currently, and started way back in closed beta: a) there's a rush of new people or activity on DW for some reason; b) people want their fandom/hobby or whatever to have a bigger presence on DW, so they start a very specific community for that specific hobby, and often put a lot of thought into making rules to make it exactly the community they want for their fandom; c) it gets maybe a small burst of activity but not much, and then dies; d) the creator gets discouraged and fades away.

The thing is, you can't get an active community that way on DW. Part of it is that DW simply doesn't have the activity levels to support an active community for small interests - you simply can't get the critical mass for super-specialized comms with DW's activity level. Part of it is that DW doesn't have the infrustructure for people to just stumble onto your community without being led there; if all you do is build it, they won't come.

Part of it is that there really isn't a lot of motivation for most people to post on a community rather than their own journal; back in the heyday of LJ communities, there was no way you could follow everybody individually who posted interesting things in your fandoms, and there were lots of open communities that had readerships much higher than most individual fans could ever dream of. On DW, if I want to hear everything that's being said about my new fandom obsession, it's not really unmanageable to just follow everyone I can find who posts about it. And if I have something to say about it, I have no motivation to go to the special-purpose community, because everybody I know of in the fandom is already in my circle anyway, and if I post to the special-purpose comm, I'm removing the possibility that people who don't already share the interest will see in on my journal and be lured into posting anyway. And posting to a community removes some of the control you have over your audience and your work, too, so if there isn't some compelling reason to post there instead of your journal, why should you?

And, tbh, even in the busiest of LJ days, you couldn't create an active community just by making it and then posting to community promo hubs. It took work and skill on the part of the mods, and connections, and luck with the zeitgeist even then; the vast majority of comms died a-borning. (In fact, I think of the comms I created in my LJ days, one of them has been more active in its DW incarnation than it ever was on LJ. Even now. The others are all dead.)

But there are advantages to a community! They provide something of an equalizing factor for people who don't already have more followers on their own journals. They provide a "public space" for a community of people that isn't also one person's private space. They can feel easier to join in on for newbies, and help network people who wouldn't find each other otherwise. The community mods do some of the work of moderation, so the OP doesn't have to worry about it as much, and the community as a whole can develop community norms and a sense of, well, community. And so on - you can probably come up with more.

I had a theory that while most specific-fandom communities just can't get going, a pan-fandom community that took everything could hit critical mass and thrive - in sort of the same spirit that AO3 takes everything, and has thus handily outcompeted all the less comprehensive archives - if it got the right start, and a large enough seed group of users that were interested in keeping in going, and committed mods. And if it did, it would serve a really valuable role on Dreamwidth. Plus I wanted a community like that because I miss active fandom communities, but I don't have enough of an attention span these days to be any use at all in specific-fandom or specific-content-type ones.

Of "the right start, and a large enough seed group of users that were interested in keeping in going, and committed mods" I think fictional_fans got maybe half of one of each of those? So it hasn't exactly taken off, but it's not dead yet, either! People post there! Who aren't me!

And I think it also has value in its origin as staranise's Perfectly Generic Fandom Comm that can be used as a starting place if you don't understand Dreamwidth yet or you're hesitant about posting in more formal-seeming places. Because of that, it's going to continue to be messy and probably have a lot of content that any individual fan doesn't care about, or that is put on there in a way that you find annoying, and I'm incapable of keeping track of other people's grudges so there's probably active members you personally despise, and it's probably going to stay that way until the active members band together and expel me from the modship (Please do! I think 'passing around the modship like a hot potato' might be a great community tradition for that place, and in fact if anybody wants to see what it looks like to have community mod powers before they start their own comm, pm me...)

Now that I finally got yesterday's post up, though, I am sort of thinking about - maybe for early next year - doing a comm-wide challenge where people sign up for a day in which they will post a pan-fandom-interesting discussion post to fictional_fans. I think it might be fun, and a good way to let people play with how to host discussion posts? Maybe, we'll see. I'm only about 1/4 of a committed mod.

Comments

[jainas]

In a french multi-fandom community I'm part of on LJ, we host a fanish Avent calendar: people register on the calendar post with masked comments indicating the day they want + what subject they want to talk about (fandom primers, squee posts, discussion on tropes or fandom trends, yearly recap, expectations for next year, etc), the mod put them on the calendar (without the subject to keep it a surprise), and of we go.
It's actually almost the only activity the community get anymore, but for now it's still come back to life every december. ^^

[melannen]

I was thinking about doing it for December this year, and then I decided there was probably already enough activity on DW this December and maybe I should wait. :D

[anotherslashfan]

I for one really enjoy the fictional_fans community. Not enough to post there, yet, but I blame that on having a 9 months old baby.

[melannen]

A 9 month old baby is an excellent excuse for many things.

[conuly]

BABY!!!!

[jjhunter]

I think a comm-wide challenge would be a fabulous idea, and I should have some more spoons in the new year to be more active as a mod, if you want me to take over organizing the actual signup post / keeping an eye on the implementation, etc.

I miss the kinds of fandom primers people would post at crack_van - maybe a stickie post signup for a weekly primer post of some kind (Mondays? Some other day of the week?) to supplement people posting ad hoc?

[melannen]

I've found that fandom primers are one of those kind of posts that are really fun to make and read but aren't natural for generating discussion, so I was thinking for the first challenge it could just be a really general "Make a post to prompt discussion about some fandom thing that everybody can participate in, no matter their fandom"? And maybe you just sign up for a week, and can post any day that week, the way crack_van worked - that way people can fit it into their schedule.

But if I did it I would, as with most things for that comm, go for the low-effort version of modding it that was basically just a sign-up calendar and maybe a polite reminder comment at the beginning of your week - that's what I did the last time I ran a challenge like that on a comm (which was quite some time ago, but I think I remember!)

[extrapenguin]

I've greatly enjoyed the interesting discussion posts of fictional_fans, so thank you for running it! The "advent calendar" model of "I'll post about X on Y day" sounds interesting, if mods can guard against potential failure modes like "everyone signs up to post in July".

[melannen]

I would probably do it "claim a week, first come first served, maximum of two claims per week, we'll keep going as long as we keep getting new claims." And I probably wouldn't make people claim topics in advance, that sounds too hard. :P

[isis]

I would be interested in participating in the pan-fandom-interesting discussion thing!

[melannen]

Hooray!

[kore]

Yeah, I hear a lot of people (rightly) complaining about how hard it is to get communities peopled on DW, and....it was the same way on LJ! People made writing comms, rewatch comms, cooking comms, whatever, and most of them would die. The amount of time and energy you have to invest in getting a community to a certain level of activity is pretty big, and even then they can go dormant.

[melannen]

Yeah, and even hard work and energy isn't enough - all the really active fan comms that I remember on LJ got a boost early on by being promoted by bnfs with huge followings - the old-school version of viral, I guess - and I've known people who put in months of devoted mod effort and got nothing because they didn't have the luck and connections

That said, there are some DW comms that have managed to stay active due in large part to the mods' hard work! There are several writing communities I know of like that, to start.

[kore]

Yeah, I belong to a bunch of fic prompt comms that are like that -- going back to structure, they tend to post the same kind of thing, daily, and that kind of consistent activity does tend to build up. But at the same time it puts all the pressure on the mods to keep things moving. I do remember that happening after a while on LJ with even busy comms, though -- people lose interest, or burnout happens, or whatever. I'd be almost interested in how subredditors keep stuff going, but....reddit.

[melannen]

I don't know if the odds of a subreddit succeeding are more or less than for an LJ comm, but I can tell you that there are a LOT of completely empty subreddits.

The fact that reddit doesn't really have an equivalent of a "personal journal" helps it along, though - you either pick an appropriate subreddit, or you don't post, there's no "my friends would like this more than the comm" option unless your friends have their own comm.

[mekare]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I have experienced some of this as a mod here. One comm is okay for now, because the small userbase is very very committed to keeping it and posts are irregular but they are there. The other one just fell asleep at some point and there never was a lot of activity to begin with.
But I had never seen this comparison to LJ (as I was never registered there, only lurking) but I am sort of relieved to hear that that‘s not a Dreamwidth only problem. I always attributed it to the increasing fractionalisation of fandom....

ETA: I should add that I really enjoy fictional_fans, especially because of its panfandom nature.

[melannen]

Oh, it definitely was a thing on LJ too! The difference is that if 99% of communities fail hard, and only .1% succeed wildly, on LJ there were so many communities being created all the time that it felt like there were tons of successes all the time. DW is just enough smaller that .1% often feels like 0.

I had a comm I co-modded that was pretty active for awhile but probably hasn't had a post in five years (partly that's my fault as mod, for letting the community get overrun by self-promotional posts, but not entirely) and a photography one that still gets a post every month or so. And fictional_fans! All the others are completely dead.

[schneefink]

Thanks for articulating your thoughts on comms and why comms are also less attractive on DW than they were on LJ etc, I think you're spot on. Sometimes I thought about posting something to a comm but then I realized that I won't have that in my own journal, which I also use as a sorta-diary, and crossposting seemed kinda silly, and the audience wasn't that big anyway and most of them are in my circle anyway, etc. etc.

[melannen]

Yep. Even with fictional_fans, which I know has people who don't follow me, I keep going "eh, I should put this on there... but would it really be worth the extra work?".